Many of the tools on this site may be called programatically or may be included in your own
website or tutorial pages.
A URL may be constructed for the ASP pages passing parameters in the query string.
Examples are provided below.

Searching

Radial

where ra is Right Ascension in degrees, dec is Declination in degrees, radius is search radius in arcminutes,
format is the format to return, which may be csv, html, or xml,
topnum is the number of rows to return. If you want all rows, put entries=all instead.

Additional parameters may be passed for restricting its range. For each band (x one of r,i,u,g,z)
check_x,min_x and max_x may be specified. Hence adding to the above we may restrict the result to rows with
u between 20 and 22 as follows:

Rectangular

where min_ra,min_dec in degrees form one corner, max_ra,max_dec form the other corner,
format is the format to return which may be csv, html, or xml,
topnum is the number of rows to return. If you want all rows, put entries=all instead.

The same parameters can be also sent using POST. The names forms are the same as the GET parameter names.

Visualization Tools

Image Cutout

This is a Web Service that returns a JPEG image centered on (ra,dec), of size (height x width)
where the image is scaled to an arbitrary scale (scale).
Various drawing options can be specified (opt).
The image cutout may be called using SOAP or through a HTTP interface, using either GET or POST.
It can be also included in a page through the URL in an IMG tag.

where ra is Right Ascension in degrees, dec is declination in degrees,
scale is the scale of the image in arcsec per pixel, 0.4 is default
opt is a string of charectors for overlays on the image codes are :

Code

Effect on image

G

Grid

L

Label

P

PhotoObjs

S

SpecObjs

T

TargetObjs

O

Outline

B

BoundingBox

F

Fields

M

Masks

Q

Plates

I

InvertImage

Finding Chart

The page, built on top of the Cutout service, creates a Finding Chart, centered
on the specified location at a specified scale. Properly formatted finding charts
can be sent to the printer. The printed image is always inverted for better looking
prints.

You may jump directly to a particular location with the navigation tool using:

where ra is Right Ascension in degrees, dec is Declination in degrees,
scale is the scale of the image in arcsec per pixel, 0.4 is default
opt is a string of characters, as listed above for the cutout service.

Navigate

This page, built from the Cutout service provides easy navigation in the vicinity
of a given point on the sky. One can move around by clicking on the frame of the image,
or on individual objects. A short list of the basic properties and a magnified thumbnail \
image of the object nearest to the selected point is then displayed.

You may jump directly to a particular location with the navigation tool using:

where ra is Right Ascension in degrees, dec is declination in degrees,
scale is the scale of the image in arcsec per pixel, 0.4 is default
opt is a string of characters, as seen above.

ImgList

This page, built from the Cutout service, can generate thumbnails of SDSS images based upon a
user defined list of object positions. The images are linked to the
other tools. The list can also be specified with a query. The page can be called via HTTP POST.
You will need a form such as the following :

The radius parameter is a float value specified in arcmin.
The firstcol parameter is the number of columns in the paste or upload file that precede the input (ra,dec or 5-part SDSS id) columns.
Valid values for format are csv,xml, or html.

This may also be submitted as a get (example for default crossid page):

Valid values for search are 'a' for all or 'n' for nearest.
Valid values for qclass are 'a' for all of photoPrimary, 'g' for Galaxies and 's' for Stars .
Valid values for qselect are 'c' for count only, 'u' URL to obj, 't' tiny (ra,dec,id,type,url), 's' small (>10), 'm' medium (>20> and 'l' large (>300>.
Valid vlaues for format are csv,xml, or html.